As Black Friday approaches, SHEIN devotes resources to support cross-border sellers to enter the "Million Dollar Club"

The intensity of this year's "Black Friday effect" may exceed the imagination of gold diggers. Market analysis points out that inflation in Europe and the United States has eased, and the global macroeconomic environment is better than the same period last year. The 2024 holiday survey released by Deloitte also shows that shoppers are more optimistic and plan to increase spending by 8% compared with last year. This season, shoppers are obviously more focused on experience and are willing to loosen their wallets in this season. It is expected that spending on experience will increase by 16% this year .

As a cross-border e-commerce platform that links supply and demand, many new sellers are rushing into the SHEIN platform with rich product supply . It is understood that in order to seize the opportunity in this annual feast, many sellers have made preparations as early as August and September , opening stores on SHEIN and carefully laying out products, hoping to lock in a bumper harvest throughout the year in this global promotion.

Although many of these sellers are new to overseas expansion, the media has also found that some SHEIN sellers who specialize in personalized leather clothing, winter sports, and household bathroom products have achieved a miraculous sales increase of 100 times that of ordinary new stores during the promotion warm-up period due to accurate product selection and successful seasonal consumption trends. For example, leather clothing with weekly sales of more than 40,000 pieces, cherry-shaped cleaning brushes with weekly sales of more than 10,000 pieces, and household products with weekly sales of more than 3,000 orders are everywhere. In addition, the SHEIN platform provides "god assists" for sellers and brand owners to participate in the global Black Friday through the SHEIN platform through a variety of integrated support such as marketing, operations, logistics and warehousing .

SHEIN devotes resources to the promotion, integrating operations + marketing + warehousing and logistics to support cross-border sellers to secure a bumper harvest on Black Friday

The cross-border e-commerce boom triggered by "Black Friday" is still going strong. An obvious sign is that an increasing number of online consumers will choose this time to shop through the "one-click global shopping" method . It is expected that the attention to Black Friday in 2024 will likely continue throughout November or even until the end of December before cooling down.

"In the past few years, we have seen some companies being smarter in their promotional methods, conducting activities more selectively than offering comprehensive discounts," said a senior executive from the retail industry, who believes that this helps manage delivery and customer traffic to attract more consumers who make smart decisions. Cross-border e-commerce platform SHEIN is also good at spreading user decision-making time over a longer period of time during the shopping season, providing unique value for consumers who are keen to find discounts early, helping sellers to efficiently digest inventory products and drive new product sales, promoting the circulation of supply and consumption, and achieving a win-win situation.

Since last year, SHEIN, which has driven hundreds of industrial belts to go overseas with the help of a series of platform resources, has gathered marketing, operation and warehousing integrated resources during this year's Black Friday promotion to help the "gold diggers" in the industrial belts adapt to the promotion rhythm more quickly :
    

The "extended" pre-marketing period helps sellers discover high-potential products and prepare stocks carefully : It is very important to prepare stocks carefully when doing cross-border business. It is the guarantee of the seller's basic cash flow. Before the official promotion, SHEIN designed and launched a number of Black Friday pre-marketing activities to help sellers test products in advance, discover high-potential products and prepare stocks carefully.

Black Friday Selected Products Enjoy Traffic + Sales Operation Support : From the official Black Friday promotion period from late November to early December, SHEIN will work with platform sellers to launch millions of selected products, including fashion apparel, home decoration, beauty products, consumer electronics and other categories, to ensure that consumers can find products to pamper themselves and their family and friends at great prices . Sellers participating in the Black Friday event can enjoy platform traffic and sales support.

Official warehousing resources added : Reasonable planning of logistics and warehousing is another important factor in cross-border sales. Plan domestic and overseas logistics and warehousing resources in advance to avoid warehouse overflow as much as possible. In addition, SHEIN recently launched the "Overseas Local Operation" service. These cooperative sellers can directly send goods to SHEIN's warehouses in Europe and the United States. The platform will take care of their overseas stocking, complete terminal delivery, provide after-sales service, etc. Once consumers place an order, the goods will be directly shipped from SHEIN's overseas warehouses to reach consumers faster.

Post-00s sellers enter the "million-dollar club" SHEIN's digital small-order quick response empowerment helps sellers achieve innovative breakthroughs

Zhang Guanghao, born in 2000, is running a hat online store on the SHEIN platform. Zhang Guanghao's father has been running a factory in Hebei for many years to accept orders from traditional foreign trade . Customers provide styles and the factory customizes them. There are always lower-priced suppliers with "similar styles but different product quality" around to snatch customers away, until everyone's profit margins are compressed, and they get sales for a short time , and then they have to continue to invest in the vicious cycle of "comparing who is cheaper" . This cycle is exhausting . Zhang Guanghao grew up in the Internet age. In his opinion, instead of spending time to expand traders one by one, repeatedly running in and expecting a long-term relationship, it is better to stay in the factory and receive global orders through a cross-border e-commerce platform in one stop.

Although Zhang Guanghao, who is still young, has no direct experience in e-commerce, the one-stop global sales, marketing, operation and logistics warehousing system resources of the cross-border e-commerce platform SHEIN allow sellers like Zhang Guanghao to thrive. What is even more unique is that SHEIN will provide guidance and help sellers find new ways to break through the homogeneous competition in the industry belt through the small-order quick response methodology that its own brand is good at . The SHEIN platform not only has many years of deep insight into overseas consumption trends , but also provides forward-looking market insights for young sellers like Zhang Guanghao , and guides him through his own flexible supply chain experience on how to grasp the secret code of hot products and quickly respond to market demand to develop special products.

As a factory successor of the younger generation, Zhang Guanghao, like most "second-generation factory workers" who try e-commerce, explores business opportunities in the Internet world. Combining SHEIN's digitalization and small-order quick-response empowerment with its own factory supply advantages, his online store's sales reached US$800,000 in the first year, and in the first half of 2024 alone, it surpassed last year's sales, and in September this year, it successfully achieved annual sales of more than one million US dollars.

The SHEIN platform also makes full use of its rich on-site resources and off-site international celebrity resources to provide sellers with high-quality on-site and off -site traffic. This traffic not only comes from accurate recommendations within the platform, but also includes the promotion of tens of thousands of international celebrities, which greatly improves the exposure and conversion rate of sellers' products. According to previous media reports, SHEIN has successfully helped many industry sellers achieve a substantial increase in sales. The success of the pioneers has undoubtedly provided a lot of useful reference for other sellers who are waiting and watching .

According to third-party statistics , SHEIN , which started with its own brand and is now constantly expanding its platform , has formed a unique "self-operated brand + platform" dual-engine model. According to a report by LatePost, SHEIN's sales last year reached approximately US$45 billion. Similarweb statistics show that SHEIN has become the world's most visited clothing and fashion website in September 2024 and the third quarter.

A senior practitioner admitted that although a rough criterion for judging the success of a cross-border seller is whether its monthly revenue has reached the threshold of "million US dollars", the sales situation on SHEIN seems to have become simpler. For example, during SHEIN Black Friday, sellers closely related to seasonal categories such as autumn and winter clothing, sports and outdoor equipment, shoes and boots, and home textiles can almost always usher in a definite sales growth , and the explosion coefficient is usually 2 or even higher, which is enough to help many cross-border newcomers break through to the "million US dollars" level in one go.

Jiang Yingjie, a SHEIN seller from Shaoxing, Zhejiang, told the media that he joined SHEIN in June this year. In the first month after joining SHEIN, Jiang Yingjie created an amazing achievement for a new cross-border store: monthly sales exceeded 2.1 million yuan. Because the retro craftsmanship of the product is consistent with the preferences of fashion consumers on the SHEIN platform, some people will buy multiple sets of curtains of different colors at one time and change the decoration according to their mood. As a person who is good at curtain weaving techniques such as jacquard, embroidery, and printing, he is well-known in the Shaoxing curtain industry belt. While pursuing craftsmanship quality, he also keeps up with the trend and tries to follow the SHEIN platform's suggestions to launch new products in small orders and successfully launch more new products, striving to maintain his advantages and strengthen his core competitiveness.

For many sellers in the industry, the era of "making money without doing anything" in foreign trade has long passed. Faced with the era of globalization and the upcoming "Black Friday" shopping festival, the next task that everyone urgently needs to complete is to get rid of the production capacity dilemma, and strive to avoid the situation where the production capacity cannot keep up, shortages and out-of-stock problems caused by the surge in cross-border sales orders, which in turn affect the consumer experience, and ensure that they can stand firm in the competition for rapid sales promotions.

Domestic sellers sold over 100 million yuan in the first year of SHEIN platform transformation and overseas expansion. Cross-border e-commerce + industrial belt jointly built a win-win ecosystem

As a newly emerging platform, SHEIN has gradually become more prominent with its unique supply chain advantages and strong market competitiveness . In a recent interview, a president of an international brand said that SHEIN is a "small Google" where consumers can search and buy a wide range of products from cost-effective shoes to novel holiday gifts. "I would like to compare SHEIN to a search engine. On SHEIN, there is a group of loyal audiences with consumption tendencies who can see your brand and products. (To some extent) SHEIN is even better than Google, because sometimes people have no willingness to consume on Google."

Judging from the feedback from the SHEIN platform since it started warming up for the year-end promotion , consumers are eager to try it out, and sellers in the industrial belt are even more optimistic about this year's Black Friday sales.

"I started developing the 'Black Friday' styles three months in advance and prepared the first wave of products 50-60 days in advance, with more than 2.5 times the daily sales." This is the peak season preparation plan agreed upon by Sun Junjie, a clothing seller in the Pearl River Delta, and his team at the Black Friday mobilization meeting a few months ago. In his multiple clothing factories in Foshan, they have been actively preparing for the Black Friday promotion on the SHEIN platform in recent months. By paying close attention to the changes in store sales, he found that there would be a new small peak every week after mid-October.

"Based on the experience of participating in SHEIN's Black Friday last year, the sales peak will last about 10 days, but from this month to December the sales will be higher than daily sales," said Sun Junjie. Compared with his previous experience of running domestic e-commerce stores, the overseas year-end promotions have greater endurance and a more stable increase in order volume.

Before opening the SHEIN store, Sun Junjie had run a domestic online store for 8 years. At that time, the sales of several platform stores combined could stably reach 4 million yuan in turnover per month. Since taking the first step of selling cross-border e-commerce from the SHEIN platform last year, his monthly sales to overseas retail alone have exceeded 24 million yuan, more than 6 times the previous amount , and sales exceeded 100 million yuan in the first year of going overseas .

"We have always heard of the SHEIN platform, because many of my colleagues started doing it two years earlier than me, but transformation requires courage. Later, as the company's domestic sales were becoming increasingly bottlenecked, I wanted to try the effects of cross-border e-commerce." For Sun Junjie, an "industrial and trade integrated enterprise" who owns his own factory, production management is his main job as a "factory manager", and cross-border sales and marketing, in his view, is another discipline that is "like a mountain between two different fields". Not only does it require continuous investment of real money, but it may not necessarily get a high investment-output ratio in return.

Moreover, if the supply volume is to be increased on the basis of the existing business volume, the challenge is not only the expansion of the production line scale, but also the speed of updating new models and the large number of return orders that may be brought by various styles in a short period of time, which also tests the efficiency and management level of the factory. "In the past, domestic e-commerce sales were basically concentrated on a few hot models. Now, among the more than 800 models on sale at SHEIN, about 40% of the models can continue to sell well. Such a large volume of sales cannot be calculated manually, and it must be supported by a digital system." According to Sun Junjie, the digital business tools provided by the SHEIN platform to sellers have provided great support for his precise stocking. As long as 100 pieces of each new model are tested first, and then the return order is produced according to the stocking suggestions, the efficiency and flexibility of the factory are fully mobilized. Moreover, with the digitalization of the SHEIN platform and the supply chain and operation management empowerment such as small order quick response, his return rate has been kept stable below 2%, and the number of visitors to the store is as high as 150,000 to 160,000 per day.

Nowadays, on major social media platforms, overseas consumers are sharing their interesting experiences of shopping at SHEIN, and more and more hot topics are being discussed: "Sharing SHEIN's Black Friday shopping cart", "Swipe left to help me put on SHEIN's popular dress", "The biggest SHEIN package I've ever bought", "SHEIN: You only need $15 to become a beauty".....

When merchants in the industry belt successfully unlock new skills to sell in the global market with the help of cross-border e-commerce platforms such as SHEIN , this is just a beautiful beginning . As the global market competition becomes increasingly lively , merchants ' demand for platform services has become more diversified and in-depth . At that time , those platforms that can deeply understand merchants' needs , provide empowerment solutions, and help merchants achieve market expansion and brand upgrades will be able to become their preferred partners.

More importantly, when the industrial belt successfully masters the ability to go overseas through cross-border e-commerce platform services , and gradually changes from a follower of global consumption trends to a creator, taking more initiative , their trust in the platform will be further deepened. This harmonious cross-border e-commerce platform + industrial belt mutually beneficial and win-win ecological system will also feed back to the upgrading and prosperity of the industry.

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